Protect The Freedom Money (Monero)

At 30 Jul 2025 By Zola Gonano

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Qubic, a mining pool that might be trying to pull off a 51% attack on Monero. If you’re not familiar, a 51% attack happens when one miner or mining pool gets control of more than half of the total network hashrate in a proof-of-work system, like Monero. That kind of control gives them a lot of power over the network.

With over 51% of the hashrate, they could do things like:

Double spend transactions (basically reversing their own payments).
Censor or block other people’s transactions.
Mess with the network by causing reorgs (basically rewriting recent blocks).

They can’t create coins out of thin air or steal from other wallets, but even so, just having that much control is a major threat. It totally undermines the idea that Monero is decentralized and trustless.

What makes this worse is that Monero already tries to avoid this kind of centralization. It uses an algorithm called RandomX, which is designed to favor CPU mining over ASICs, making it easier for individuals to mine and harder for any one player to dominate. But now it looks like Qubic might be gaming the system, or maybe they’ve just built up a huge chunk of the network.

Even if Qubic hasn’t done anything malicious yet, just the fact that they could is enough to mess with the trust in the system. That’s a big deal for a privacy coin like Monero, where trustless operation is kind of the whole point.

What to do to protect Monero?

If Monero’s at risk of a 51% attack, especially from a pool like Qubic gaining too much hashrate, then the community needs to act fast and decisively. Here’s what can be done:

1. Move your hash away from Qubic

Stop mining with Qubic. If you’re a miner and you care about Monero staying secure and decentralized, you’re actively helping a dangerous situation by mining with a pool that’s near or above 51%. There are other pools out there and better yet, there’s P2Pool.

2. Use and promote P2Pool

P2Pool is a decentralized mining pool that doesn’t have a central operator. No one owns it, and it’s much harder for it to become a single point of failure. If more miners use P2Pool, the network naturally becomes more decentralized. It also pays directly to your wallet, so there’s no middleman holding your coins.

The downside is it can be a bit trickier to set up, especially for new miners but that’s where education and community support come in. If you have the technical knowledge, help others get started on P2Pool.

This kind of threat doesn’t always need a technical fix. Sometimes, a social one works faster. If enough people in the community call it out, on Reddit, Twitter, forums, wherever, it creates pressure. Most miners don’t want to kill the coin they’re mining. They just want rewards. So if enough people raise awareness that Qubic is a threat, some of that hash might migrate on its own.

4. Prepare for a hard fork if needed

If Qubic doesn’t back down and miners don’t shift away, Monero might need to consider a hard fork to change the mining algorithm again, like it’s done in the past to kick out ASICs. This isn’t ideal, and it shouldn’t be the first move, but it is an option. A hard fork could break Qubic’s hold if it’s relying on some kind of custom setup.

But forks might split the community if not handled well, and they disrupt normal users. So this should be a last resort.

5. Ongoing education and decentralization

Long-term, the only real defense is decentralization. That means:

More miners running their own nodes.
Less reliance on big pools.
Better tools to make mining easier for individuals.

And maybe most importantly, more awareness. A lot of miners don’t even realize how dangerous centralization is until it’s too late.